Khmer Unicode is great – until you get on a site that hasn’t used any Khmer Unicode Web Fonts and the system default Khmer font is used. Unfortunately, most system default Khmer fonts are horrible looking (especially the Khmer font supplied with Windows). So, what can you do about it as a webmaster? Plenty! If you run a Khmer only website – the solution is much easier than if you have a multilingual site. Some browsers (like Firefox) allow you to set a font for a specific language – but others do not. So plain Khmer Unicode text looks like…

Much thanks to SIL and all their hard work on improving (and fixing) the code for LibreOffice allowing it to correctly and automatically break Khmer words without the user having to insert zero-width spaces manually. If you are interested in trying it out yourself visit the nightly builds for LibreOffice here and download the version for your operating system: LibreOffice Nightly Builds You can also access the source code of the automatic word breaker for Khmer at GitHub here. The source is based on frequency dictionaries of Khmer words with probability counts as well as a long list of names…